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Past research involving turnover in work teams has largely focused on turnover as a dependent variable. With the growing trend towards more fluid, project-based teams, the effects of team membership changes on team processes and outcomes are in need of theoretical development and systematic study. Building on previous work by others (e.g. Arrow & McGrath, 1995; Marks, Mathieu & Zacarro, 2001), we develop a framework for understanding the effects of the rate of membership change, or team fluidity, on emergent states and processes in teams. Specifically, we: (a) discuss the theoretical underpinnings of team fluidity; (b) review past team research involving turnover; (c) make theoretically-grounded propositions about the effects of team fluidity on emergent states and process variables as well as additional propositions about boundary conditions; (d) discuss implications for human resource management practices; and (e) identify methodological challenges, including measurement issues, in studying team fluidity.

The purpose of this paper is to outline an empirical study of how professionals experience work and learning in complex adaptive organisations. The study uses a complex adaptive systems approach, which forms the basis of a specifically developed conceptual framework for explaining professionals’ experiences of work and learning.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 professionals from a variety of organisations, industry sectors and occupations in Sydney, Australia. The transcripts were subjected to an adapted phenomenographic analysis, and an analysis using the complex adaptive organisations conceptual framework (CAOCF).

The findings indicated that professionals experienced learning mainly through work, where work was experienced as fluid and influenced by varying degrees of emergence, agency, complex social networks and adaptation. Further, the greater the degree of work fluidity, the greater the impetus towards learning through work, empirically indicating that the experience of learning in contemporary organisations is entwined with work.

This study used the concept of complex adaptive organisations as a conceptual framework, coupled with an adapted phenomenographic methodology, to investigate individual professionals’ experiences of work and learning. The adoption of the concept of complex adaptive organisations provided a rigorous way to adopt a complexity approach. In particular, the concept of emergence provides insights into how organisational complexity influences work and, subsequently, learning and adaptation.

This paper seeks to explore how workers engage in informal online communities for work‐learning. Although online communities may facilitate learning and knowledge creation, much of the literature is situated in formal online courses, suggesting a need to better understand the nuances of more informal learning spaces online.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 11 own‐account self‐employed workers (contractors and consultants who do not have staff).

Participants engaged in ways that fit with expectations, leveraged fluidity, played with boundaries, and meshed with work. These workers attempted to (re)configure online spaces to create the degree of connection and learning needed, although not always successfully. This study explores how participants participated in much less pedagogically inscribed spaces and foregrounds several issues related to online engagement: managing exposure, force‐feeding community, and navigating multi‐purpose spaces.

There are indications that these workers are moving toward more networked architectures of online participation. How the notion of online community continues to evolve warrants further research.

Although turning to an online community is sometimes the only viable learning option, online presence brings challenges to be addressed by practitioners and policy makers, including attending to the nature of relationships in and between different cyberspaces, information and media literacies required, and the implications of such extensive connectivity between people and their web‐technologies.

By exploring how adults reach out to others in “informal” online communities for learning purposes, this paper encourages researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and citizens to consider tensions and questions associated with cyberspace collectives.

This paper aims to draw on data from a study of professionals’ experiences of work and learning framed by a complex adaptive systems approach to examine the nexus of work and learning in complex adaptive organisations.

The study used an adapted phenomenographic approach and the complex adaptive systems conceptual framework (CAOCF) to analyse data from semi-structured interviews with fourteen professionals from a variety of organisations and industry sectors within Sydney, Australia.

The findings highlight that work in complex adaptive organisations is best described as fluid work. Further, the findings suggest that fluid work influences professionals towards flexible learning approaches that take place in the flow of work.

This paper empirically demonstrates the nexus of work and learning as experienced by professionals in their day-to-day work, as well as the ways in which fluid work influences flexible and adaptable learning through participation in work.

This paper aims to identify, classify and study emerging social and business trends associated with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

By adopting the meta-synthesis method, the study scrutinizes, synthesizes and interprets the findings from a pool of publications. This approach results in identifying 53 key ideas that are classified under nine dominant trends.

The study identifies and examines nine major trends caused and intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic, i.e. the rise of authoritarianism, the new era of corporate welfare, deep imbalances in public finances, exacerbated inequalities, higher risks of poverty and famine, the dominance of giant corporations, the increasing influence of big tech, the accelerated innovation and the fluidity of work and organizations. The paper suggests that these trends are the continuation of the past three decades’ transformations, are contributing to the rising concentration of power and wealth and are leading to a new type of globalization marked by high connectivity and low tangibility.

The originality of this paper resides in adopting a multidisciplinary approach to analyzing various social and business dimensions of a complex phenomenon. While the study should not be viewed as a comprehensive investigation, it offers a groundwork for further research on Covid-19.

The assumption that the family migrates as a unit downplays migrants’ circularity. This chapter focuses on China's rural–urban labor migrants that travel back and forth between the sites of work and home community and between places of work. I argue that migrants and their households pursue work flexibility in order to obtain the best of the urban and rural worlds, by gaining earnings from urban work and at the same time maintaining social and economic security in the countryside. Work flexibility demands flexibility in household organization, in the form of division of labor and collaboration between genders, generations, and households. Based on a study in Sichuan, I examine household biographies and narratives to identify migrants’ work and household strategies.

Migrants change jobs frequently, switch from one type of work to another and one location to another readily, and often return to the home village for months or even years before pursuing migrant work again. Not only are migrants ready to split the household between the city and the countryside, but also they frequently change from one form of division of labor to another. The inside–outside model, where the wife stays in the village and the husband does migrant work, used to be the dominant arrangement. Over time, the outside–outside model, where both the husband and wife migrate to work and leave behind other family members, is increasingly popular. This is facilitated by intergenerational and interhousehold division of labor in the form of assistance by the extended family. Intergenerational division of labor takes place when the second generation is replacing the parents in migrant work. This research's findings support the notion that rural–urban migrants are fast becoming a hybrid segment of Chinese society, playing dual roles of farmers and urban workers and straddling the peasant and urban worlds.

This paper aims to introduce, explain and illustrate the concept of “sites of emergent learning” (SEL), which pinpoints particular instances of learning in everyday practice. This concept is located within contemporary practice-oriented and sociomaterial approaches to understanding workplace learning.

This conceptual development has been resourced by a secondary analysis of data from three workplace learning studies. These were: an ethnographic study of a residential parenting service; a case study of learning among engineers working on a railway construction site; and a case study of a multicultural unit that aims to enhance health services for a diverse community. All were based in the Sydney metropolitan area. The secondary analysis was undertaken by identifying regular practices within each setting where professionals discuss past and future work. These were then subjected to theoretical scrutiny, identifying common and distinctive features.

SEL were identified within the handover, site-walks and catch-up meeting practices. They arise through and are constituted in relationships between social practices and the materialities of work. SEL involve negotiating, exploring and questioning practice and knowledge associated with it; they are instances within work practices in which work is done about how work gets done, developing new understandings of the past to reshape visions for the future. Alongside these commonalities, each site of emergent learning displayed distinctive features shaped by the particularities of the practices and materialities of each site.

This concept is presented as a valuable tool to assist researchers of workplace learning. It elucidates particular learning-intensive features of practice, extending sociomaterial conceptualisations of professional and workplace learning.

According to the critic Tom Lubbock, ‘Cloth is the universal free element. It doesn't have to explain itself. It performs’ (Lubbock, 2002). Cloth drapes and folds, becoming a membrane separating what is outside from what is inside. In this chapter, I draw on the writings of de Certeau, Rendell, Tschumi, etc. to develop ideas concerning the ways in which the use and understanding of textiles may move our perceptions of the boundaries of space, and the location of place. I argue that cloth may contain the identity of place, and that lace and lace net-works provide a starting point for the exploration of fluid space as described by Isozaki, Ishigami, etc. ¹ I also discuss those structures/mise-en-scène which frame our awareness and interpretation of place and space. Examples of work drawn from art, cinema and architecture are used to illuminate those ideas which question the materiality and purpose of form and enclosure.